NuCaptcha creates video ads

Ads in your security feature: just when you thought it was safe to post a comment

Ads are just about everywhere on the Internet. When you check your email, ads are there. When you sign onto Facebook to post a few photos, ads are there. Check out a new YouTube video, ads are there. When you check your favorite blog, ads are there.

Just when you thought ads couldn't get any more prolific, or disruptive, a new way of distributing ads has come to turn your day into a commercial experience.

Now, advertisements will be in Captchas - those often-seen requests at the end of sign-ups to make sure those signing up are humans and not bots.

These captchas are hard enough to figure out as humans. Now, we'll have to figure them out while they're on the move in a video.

Check out the example to the left. 

The new ads will work something like this. You go to sign in or comment on a blog, the way that you usually would. When you go to answer the security question, instead of a simple image, where you have to fill in combination of letters and numbers, you will see a video box. That video will have a word, or set of letters scrolling across the bottom of the video. This will also be accompanied by a scrolling message, which goes along with the video ads. Your job is to pick out the letters that do not belong with the message, highlighted in red, and type them into the box.

Captchas, a fairly common security feature on many sites, was created by the Vancouver, BC-based, NuCaptcha, which was founded in 2008. This program is called NuCaptcha Engage. The system is based on the NuCaptcha Security Platform. The platform is based on a Behavior Analysis System, which monitors users interactions with the site and determines a level of Captcha difficulty based on the likelihood that a user is an attacker to the site.

The videos come to the site displayed as an H.264 MPEG-4 Video Stream. The videos are rendered in the browser. Most commonly, they are displayed as a HTML5 video tag, though other options include Flash or an animated GIF. Ads will be available in the following sizes: 300 x 250; 300 x 125; and 640 x 480.

There are two models for pricing, if you choose to run your ads on this platform. Your first choice, is a video CPM basis, which runs roughly $10 to $25. CPM refers to, the price per 1000 views of the ad. This means that depending on the site and the length of your video, you will pay somewhere between $10 and $25 for every 1000 views of your ad on various sites. The second is a cost-per-engagement model, which runs between $0.10 to $1.00, which is designed for larger, longer videos. In the cost-per-engagement model, you only pay when the ad is interacted with. The Captcha service itself is free to site owners, through the NuCaptcha Basic program. The basic program is limited to 25,000 Captchas per month. The basic program's big brother, which site owners pay for, gives an unlimited number of Captchas and control over which ads are shown on the site.

Its largest competitor is the ReCaptcha program, which is used by sites like Facebook, Ticketmaster, and Craigslist.

While these ads may have some solid security applications, users are bound to have mixed reactions, and as with any ads there is the risk of overexposure, a problem that happens with any video-based format, if ads are run too frequently. Captcha ads boast over 100 billion views in the last year, which is a doubling of the service's usage in the last two years.

The ad program, which is slated to go live on October 26th, is already slated to be used by Activision, Coastal Contact, Club Vibes, Disney and Gnosis.

Captcha was not available for comment at this time.

(Image courtesy of Captcha)